Wednesday, April 28, 2010

If you all haven't noticed, I retitled the blog to be Musings of a Systems Admin. I figure I have enough to write about systems administration (rather than just server related admin) that I needed a place to write without starting a new blog. That being said, welcome to Musings of a Systems Admin!

I have recently set up our primary internal firewall to accept connections only through port 22 to force all remote connections to be initialized through an encrypted ssh tunnel... a good idea to start at least.At the beginning, everything worked nicely connecting from my remote Linux (Ubuntu) machine. I then proceeded to connect a Windows Vista and a Windows 7 machine with putty. Unfortunately no dice with both.

Here's the exact problem. I created the tunnel for port 445 (localhost:445 destination:445) and connected. SSH connected fine but trying to access the localhost fileshare resulted in a timeout/network device could not be found.

I searched the internet for several hours trying to find a solution to the problem (or even any info as to why it wasn't working when it should) and finally stumbled upon a Microsoft technet forum talking about my exact issue.

The cause of the problem is that in Windows Vista and Windows 7 (as well as Windows XP SP3), Microsoft has auto-bound ports 445 and 139, even when file sharing services are turned off. This is why you can't create an ssh tunnel; because the port is already in use.

The solution. After reading and trying each suggested solution to no avail, I finally stumbled upon a link to a program someone coded to remedy the situation. To my knowledge this works on every operating system (though I've only tested it on Vista and 7).

About Me

I'm a Server Administrator and a web developer (Microsoft SharePoint/.Net, Joomla, Drupal, PHP, and JavaScript).
I work a lot but contrary to popular belief, I do have a life outside of work that typically involves coffee and a few friends.